Ghosts and Other Lovers (7 page)

But how could she go to him when she couldn't leave this room? She might write a letter, but anything she sent out would have to go through Mildred. She imagined Mildred reading it and throwing it on the fire. And even if she managed to by-pass Mildred she realized with despair that she had no address for Mr. Elphinstone.

Hopeless.

There was a tingling in her fingertips.

No, not hopeless.

She remembered how the form of Mr. Elphinstone had first emerged from her body -- the struggle, and how terrified she had been. He was still there, still waiting to come out. She no longer feared him, at least not in the same way. There were other, greater fears. She was ready now to welcome him and his plans for her.

She put out her hands and let the solid smoky stuff stream out; watched as it formed into fingers touching her own at the tips. A man's fingers, a man's large hands, bony wrists lengthening into skinny arms, naked shoulders and naked chest. She was trembling now and starting to feel faint, but she held her hands as steady as she could and let it go on happening, thinking all the while of Mr. Elphinstone, remembering him as he had been, and as he was. Now the neck and head. The shifting clouds of his face roiled and finally solidified into bearded chin and mouth, long thin nose, high brow, and the eyes -- the eyes were closed.

She stared and waited for them to open; waited to have those blazing orbs fixed on her, and see the lips move, and hear him speak. He was finished now, at least, as much of him as she could make. She could do no more. It was up to him to take over. But Mr. Elphinstone looked dead, like the baby, hanging motionless in the air.

Lydia had said that at most seances when ghosts appeared they spoke, answering questions and making cryptic remarks. Her baby of course had been too young.

"Talk to me," said Eustacia. "Tell me what to do."

Her breath disturbed the figure, making it bob slightly. A bit of one arm disintegrated, leaving a hole the size of a baby's fist just above the right elbow. She cried out again, and her fingers closed on cold, dead matter. When she pulled away, sickened, she saw she had destroyed parts of both lower arms, and the hands floated free, detached from the arms. One of the hands floated up toward the ceiling, becoming more insubstantial as it rose.

Mr. Elphinstone could not speak to her, for Mr. Elphinstone was not here. She had created something that looked like Mr. Elphinstone -- or like her memory of Mr. Elphinstone -- and that was all. It did not live. It never had and never would. It was inhabited by no ghosts. There were no ghosts. She could not blame Mr. Elphinstone for that, nor for the fact that he could neither enslave nor save her.

She was alone in her room as she watched her dream disintegrate. She was alone with her disease, her curse, her madness -- her strange, useless talent.

She was a woman of thirty years, unmarried, childless. She had never lost anyone close to her. And in that summer the doctors found an inoperable, malignant tumor in her father's brain.

Sitting with her father, Alida longed to ask him about the experience of dying, but she could not, any more than she had ever been able to ask him, when she was younger, about sex. There were certain mysteries parents would never reveal to their children. Even to ask him about pain seemed disrespectful. She saw him every weekend, and usually one evening during the week as well, and when she visited she tried to be cheerful and ordinary, and to anticipate his needs, giving him the pills before he asked for them. They said little to each other. Their closest moments, then as always, were in watching television, sharing the same vicarious experience, her laugh echoing his.

And then she saw death, before her very eyes.

She was in Holborn underground station, waiting for a train after a weary day at work. The platform was hot and crowded, and Alida stared at a particular man simply because he happened to be in her line of sight.

Her thoughts were on other things -- her father, a new pair of shoes, an argument at work -- but she absorbed the fact that this dark-haired, dark-skinned man in early middle-age was wearing a suit which looked too heavy for the weather, and was fanning himself erratically with a folded
Financial Times
.

She saw him hit himself in the face with the paper as he dropped it, and, as the paper fell, he fell too, heavily and clumsily, his arms and legs jerking stiffly, out of control. He was probably dead by the time he hit the ground. Alida didn't need a doctor's pronouncement to confirm her impression: she seemed to know it instinctively, with the same certainty that she knew she was alive.

Although he was a stranger, his death made a powerful impression on her. That night she couldn't fall asleep: she kept seeing his death, as if the darkness of her room was a screen for the film of her memories. She noticed new details -- the pattern on his tie, the scuff marks on his shoes -- and saw all the other individuals who made up the crowd in which he died. There was a girl in a pink dress and white cloth boots reading
The Clan of the Cave Bear
; two dirty, spiky-haired teenagers in black leather holding hands; a cluster of American women talking loudly about
Cats
; a man with one gold earring; a couple of sober, dark-suited businessmen, one of whom carried a bright blue plastic briefcase; an Oriental woman with two doll-like children; a man in black --

A man in black who had not been there before, and was no longer there after, the death.

Alida sat up in bed, struggling to breathe, closing her eyes the better to see.

A man in black.

Close to the man who had died. She saw his hand come out; he had touched the man who died. When? Before or after the paper fell? Could it have been coincidence? Just a man in a black suit among so many others in gray or blue or brown --

Except that she couldn't see his face, as she could see the faces of all the others. And after the death, he was gone. Gone utterly, as if he had never been.

No matter how she struggled, she could not see his face, nor where he went after the death. When at last, near morning, she slept, it was to dream about the man in black, standing in the crowded underground station, watching her, watching her father fall before her and die.

The following week, Alida decided to alter her usual habit of visiting her parents on Saturday, and instead went to see some friends who were fixing up an old house in Stoke Newington.

It was a warm, sunny day, and as she stepped off the bus at the request stop on Newington Church Street, Alida noticed how many people were out: clumps of drably dressed teenagers lounging against the buildings; women in brilliant saris flowing along like the personification of summer; geriatric couples moving at a snail's pace; young mothers trying to keep their children close at hand. The street rose and curved, and the pavements were narrow. As Alida dodged and moved along, she occasionally was forced off the curb into the road, which made her nervous, for the traffic moved swiftly, and the drivers, as they rounded the curve, did not slow down or seem aware of the need for special care.

Ten yards ahead, by the tobacconist's shop before the bend in the road, a golden retriever was lying on the pavement, and a woman with a baby in a pushchair had paused to talk to two young men, creating a bottleneck which might be dangerous if some impatient pedestrian stepped off the curb into the road at the wrong moment. But it wasn't the awareness of possible danger which made Alida feel suddenly cold, made her clench her teeth and walk more quickly as she rubbed bare arms prickling with gooseflesh; it was the sight of the man in black waiting just beyond the woman, baby, men, and dog.

She didn't for a moment believe she was mistaken, that he might have been some other man in an ordinary black suit, because it was by some sense other than sight that she recognized him. In fact, from this distance she could not even see his face which was somehow -- mysteriously, in the open air and bright sunlight -- in shadow.

She began to walk even more quickly, almost running, in her determination to reach him before he could disappear -- determined to see his face and find him ordinary.

Beside her, below her line of sight, someone else was moving: a child. And she heard a woman's voice, sharp but tired, calling behind her: "Gavin!"

Alida realized that she was going to have to jog down into the street for a moment: either that or trip over the dog, or risk losing sight of her quarry as she pushed past the people in her way. The risk of the traffic seemed preferable.

Something brushed past her hip: still thinking of the dog, she glanced down and saw a red-haired child, perhaps three years old, running past and giggling. From behind, sounding more despairing, the woman's voice again: "
Gav
-in!"

The man in black stepped forward, now, like the child, actually standing in the street. His arms were outstretched, and he bent his knees, lowering himself, reaching for the child who, seemingly unaware, was running directly toward him.

Alida was staring straight at the man in black now, and still she could not see his face. There was a glare of sunlight reflecting off the windows of an approaching car, and it dazzled her.

Later, she went over and over it in her mind, trying to figure out why she had done what she did.

She had known, on the instant of seeing the man in black stretching out his arms, that the child was doomed. Young Gavin was obviously about to die -- probably to be hit by a car rounding the bend.

It would have been a normal response, not even heroic, to have grabbed the child, to have scooped him into her arms and pulled him back to safety and to the gratitude of his mother. It would have been the act of a moment, the obvious thing to do, to have thrown herself at the child. But she had not.

Instead, against all reason, Alida had flung herself at the man in black, had thrown herself into his waiting, outstretched arms, and taken the embrace that was meant for the child.

The next thing she knew was pain. A blinding agony that lanced all through her, stretched her joints out of socket and broke every bone, took even her scream and shattered it inside her agonized eardrums. She was ripped apart and thrown back together into a shuddering, wracked heap that knew not even its own name.

"Are you all right, love?"

Opening her eyes was like ripping skin off a barely healed wound; her throat was too raw for a moan. Alida realized that she was alive. She was standing on Newington Church Street, her back against a wall, and before her was a little white-haired lady -- hair-net protecting her fresh perm, blue dress buttoned up to the neck, handbag square and glossy as the Queen's -- gazing at her with concern.

Alida looked down at herself and saw that she was whole, with no signs of blood or bruising, even her clothes -- flowered print skirt and sleeveless pullover -- undisturbed.

"What happened?" she asked, and clenched her teeth and rocked against the wall as an aftershock of pain ripped through her.

"I don't know my love, I'm sure. I happened to notice you, and you were backing up to the wall as if you couldn't stand properly on your own, and you had a look on your face  . . . it was the look that worried me. . . ."

"Not . . . a car didn't hit me?" Alida looked out at the road, past the woman's emphatic negative, to where the multi-colored traffic glittered in the sun and surged ceaselessly past.

She saw the yellow dog panting in the sunlight, still blocking the door to the tobacconist's shop, although the two young men and the woman with the pushchair had moved on out of sight. She forced herself away from the wall, far enough to look around the bend, and was rewarded by the sight of Gavin's red curls. The little boy's hand was firmly in his mother's grip as they walked away.

As for the man in black --

The pain that was her memory of him was so sudden and sharp that she bit her tongue, finding the taste of blood a relief.

"I'll be all right," she said to the woman who was still worrying about her. "It's over now."

"Maybe it was the heat," said the old woman. "I'd see a doctor, though, just to make sure. It might be your heart, and you can't be too careful."

But Alida knew it wasn't the heat, and it wasn't her heart. It was death, and she had survived it.

She walked on, moving slowly, for the intensity of the experience had left her feeling almost boneless. As she came to the old churchyard she went in and sank onto a low stone bench to rest. She couldn't face her friends just yet: they would know by looking at her that something had happened, and she didn't know how she could explain it to them. She wasn't sure she wanted to tell anyone, for she expected disbelief, and she did not want to be made to doubt her own experience.

She had seen Death. She had felt it, gone through, and survived.

Despite the warmth of the day, Alida shivered. The agony was still there, on the edge of her consciousness, dangerous even to think about. And yet -- she had come through. Death, like pain, was comprehensible; it had a place in the world like that other mystery, sex. And, like sex, it was both simpler and more momentous than she had imagined in her innocence.

She felt almost pleased with herself, with her new maturity. After a few more moments of reflection she was able to stand up, smooth down her skirt, and go to see her friends as if she was the same person they had always known.

She thought that was the end of it. She had satisfied her curiosity and cured her obsession; she had come to terms with her own mortality and that of others and need no longer dream of death.

But Death had not finished with her. On the bus that evening, going home, she saw the man in black perched on a seat beside a frail old woman. His face was turned away to the window, as if he was watching the passing scene. Later, she saw him huddled in a doorway between two shabby tramps with a bottle of wine, and another day he leaned solicitously over a baby in a pram, and dogged the footsteps of a heavy-set young man. Death was everywhere, and no matter how she tried, Alida could not blind herself to his dark presence. Even when she did not see the man in black she sensed him near.